jim@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Jim Fulton) (11/16/88)
The good news is that we emphatically agree with you. The bad news is that a lot of the glossy introductory material that everyone wants probably isn't going to come from us. But, this doesn't mean that it won't appear. One of the major "problems" is that people are contributing lots of code, but not very much documentation. I've been twisting various people's arms to add to the doc/tutorials/ section of the distribution, but it will take time. Although MIT's releases are not targeted for end users, we do try our hardest to help as much as we can. I see things like the xdm configurations (clients/xdm/config/) and xinit scripts (such as contrib/clients/x11startup/) as ripe areas for some friendly competition and sharing. Unfortunately, until the donations of prose hit critical mass, you'll have to "Use the source, Luke" if you wish to use the MIT release directly. A small silver lining to this is that it provides an opportunity for budding entrepeneurs who are interested in doing consulting work. Things should get a little better when the various products and books that are currently in the final stages of development start shipping. We plan to continue distributing the sources for all of our major documents. Next time we will probably go back to to including pregenerated versions, subject to space on the appropriate media. Of course, I suspect that many people will want to buy the published books anyway to see the nice pictures. :-) Jim Fulton MIT X Consortium